Mississippians should start getting their new Medicare cards this summer, the U.S. Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services announced recently. The agency is sending a new Medicare card to all 60 million or so Medicare beneficiaries (including more than 560,000 in Mississippi), as part of a long-awaited shift away from using the Social Security number as the card’s identifier.

However, don’t get in a rush in anticipation; Mississippi residents will be among the last set of states to get their new cards. Although the CMS will start mailing cards in April to residents in some states, the agency is using a seven-phase roll-out of the card distribution, and the agency states that Magnolia State beneficiaries will start getting their cards “after June 2018.” Don’t feel slighted, though; residents of Kentucky, Louisiana, Michigan, Missouri, Ohio, Puerto Rico, Tennessee and the U.S. Virgin Islands are all scheduled to get their cards in Phase 7 as well.

CMS has been under pressure the past several years to replace the Medicare Beneficiary Identifier, which has traditionally been the same as the beneficiary’s Social Security number. In 2015, Congress passed the Medicare Access and CHIP Reauthorization Act of 2015, which requires Medicare to replace the old identifiers with a new, 11-character Medicare Beneficiary Identifier by April 2019.

Identity theft has become such a big problem in recent years that most agencies and businesses have stopped using the Social Security number as a primary identifier. While it was once convenient, the Social Security number became widely used by identity thieves. The bad news is that scammers are still trying to get consumers to give up their Social Security numbers by using a variety of tactics.

A 71-year-old man in Austin, Texas, told a local TV station recently that he’d gotten five calls in a single day from scammers who promised to pick up the card in exchange for money. Others have reported getting calls claiming they have to send in their old cards before the new ones can be mailed, being threatened with loss of benefits, or told their cards are expiring. Don’t believe any of it.

CMS notes that no one will call you about the new card, and you don’t have to do anything. It will come in the mail to you at the address Medicare has on file for you. And if you talk to somebody in another state who has already gotten their card but yours hasn’t yet arrived, don’t fret; remember that the cards are being sent out gradually, state-by-state. Once you get your new card, destroy the old one immediately (but keep your Medicare Advantage card) and put the new one in your wallet or purse. It’s important to protect it as you would any other sensitive information. Physicians and other providers who bill Medicare are already getting instructions about the new cards, and how to implement them in their systems so they should have no trouble with your new card.